Herbert Baum Group
Herbert Baum was born in 1912 and moved to Berlin when he was young. By 1926 he was an active member in a number of left-wing and Jewish youth organizations. When the National Socialists took power, he and his wife Marianne Baum joined with their friends Martin and Sala Kochmann to hold meetings that discussed how to deal with the threat of the Nazis. They met in either the Kochmann drawing room or within the apartments of different members.
Herbert Baum was made chairman of the group which consisted of as many as 100 people most of whom were in their early 20s or younger. The group would hold political debates and cultural discussions, they also handed out leaflets that spoke out against National Socialism. The group became more determined when in 1940 Herbert Baum was taken and forced into slave labor at the electromotive works of the Siemens-Schuckertwerke.
In 1942 he became the head of a group of Jewish slave laborers at the plant who, fearing deportation to the concentration camps, went into the Berlin underground. Herbert Baum has been described more as a loyal communist to the Soviet Union and less concerned with the plight of the Jewish people. Yet the majority of the members of his group were Jewish, and it was an attack on an anticommunist and anti-Semitic propaganda exhibition that they were most known for.
On May 18, 1942, Joseph Goebbels was showing his exhibition that was filled with the propaganda of the Nazi party. Herbert Baum and his group attempted burn down the entire exhibition but they were only somewhat successful. Soon after many members of the group were arrested and 20 of them were sentenced to death. Herbert Baum was arrested on May 22 and was tortured to death, dying on June 11. Marianne Baum was executed on August 18, 1942.